





Author 



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EARLY MODERN EUROPE. 



AN INTRODUCTION TO A COURSE OF LECTURES 
ON THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



BY 



WILLIAM JOHNSON, M.A. 

FELLOW OF king's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
ASSISTANT MASTER AT ETON. 



®amt)rit(ge : 

E. JOHNSON, TRINITY STREET. 

1869. 






For the use of some boys who were to be examined in the 
histoiy of EDgland and Europe from the accession of Henry YIII 
to the death of Elizabeth, this paper was written in about twelve 
hours saved during a week from the work of a schoolmaster, and 
was printed without revision. 



205449 

'13 



EAELY MODEKN EUROPE. 



The period to which your attention is directed may be called a 
century, the sixteenth century. One of the illusions to which 
we are all liable is that of looking upon a century as a solid 
measurable object with a form and colour of its own. It is 
convenient to examine human affairs in parcels, but Providence 
does not really make them up and assort them in parcels. You 
can seldom fix with anything like precision the point at which 
a political movement begins or ends. Nor can you, for the 
whole of Europe, or for the whole of Western Europe, assign 
to a particular term of years a particular character, so as to say, 
such a man or such an institution could not have been found 
at any other time. Suppose we use for oiu' own political 
history, as we do for our architectural history, the expression 
" Tudor Period": this will serve us fairly well; for there is a 
strong family likeness in our Tudor sovereigns, and in a certain 
sense there is, from the accession of Henry VII to the death 
of Elizabeth, a line of policy deliberately pursued in England 
by five successive rulers: but it is not a term applicable to 
Europe, or even to Western, or North- Western Europe. Shall 
we try to find a term of wider range ? Shall we speak of this 
Tudor century as the "Renaissance"? That French word, to 
which you will in due time be formally introduced by one of 
your teachers, denotes the new birth or revival of literature and 
art. No doubt this description of the era, of the cinque cento 



as the Italians call it, is more available for the traveller in 
France and Italy, where the eye encounters in every town some 
building or some picture dating from 15 — , and generally associ- 
ated or capable of being associated with some literature of our 
selected century's creation or revival, whilst this literature in its 
turn proves on inspection to be linked with some intellectual 
force acting combatively in some struggle, religious or political, 
or both: so that in speaking of the Renaissance one would 
not be merely skimming the surface of human affairs and 
noticing only what belongs to the taste, but really dipping into the 
serious life of our awakening Western nations. But it so happens 
that those who harp upon the word Renaissance are for the 
most part men who habitually contrast it with what they call 
the Ages of Faith. Now this contrast is what an ordinary 
scholar or student of history cannot admit. For, though it is 
true that Gothic architecture passed out of fashion in our 
16th century, it is not true that this was owing to a decay of 
faith. The very people who then set the fashion of building 
churches without pointed arches or groined fretted roofs were 
the early Jesuits, the restorers of faith, the enemies of reason, 
the champions of the Holy Father, the heralds of Catholic 
obedience. They built in their new style, I believe, partly 
because they wanted to be heard when they preached, and 
partly because Palestrina (1565) introduced at Rome a new 
religious music, and they wanted smooth resonant walls and 
roofs for its performance: and to a parallel musical movement 
you may refer also the construction of heavy organ-lofts and 
the consequent separation of Choir from Nave in our own 
Cathedrals and College Chapels. Now it is obvious that faith 
or devotion can hardly be decaying where there is an increased 
desire to hear sermons and to perform devotional music. One 
is almost tempted to turn the tables on those who use Renais- 
sance as a term of disparagement and to say to them in a 
downright way: "My sixteenth century is the Age of Faith: 
if you deny this, show me a century which you think better 
entitled to the name." 

And in the same spirit, savouring perhaps of paradox, one 
is tempted to answer those who lament that the age of Chivalry 



terminated at the death of the Chevaher Bayard, and to assert 
that Bayard was not the last but rather the first of chivalrous 
gentlemen; since it is clear, that though the Emperor Maximilian 
and King James IV of Scotland, whose deaths fall just within 
our period, are in their rashness and their purposeless ventures 
somewhat more like heroes of chivalrous romance than are 
the Kings who follow them, yet they are not so high-souled, 
so sensitive on the point of honour, so faithful to their friends, 
as the Huguenots and Elizabethan lords, much less can they 
be compared with the Cavaliers and Roundheads, or with the 
heroes of British India; whilst, if you interpret chivalry as 
knight-errantry, Maximilian and James of Flodden Field are not 
more venturesome than Essex, or Frobisher, or Clifford Earl of 
Cumberland, or Sir Walter Raleigh. 

I have then rejected as partial or insufficient two positive 
and two negative descriptions of our selected era: I refuse to 
call it the Tudor age, or the Renaissance: I do not admit that 
it is not an age of faith, or that it is not an age of chivalry. 

Do you then propose to call it the time of intellectual 
freedom, of free enquiry ? This is a view which has been taken, 
and with strong reason. For the most striking transaction that 
we have here to deal with is the successful rebellion against 
authority which we call the Reformation. Luther burnt the 
Pope"'s Bull publicly and was not himself burnt for it. This 
is a fact of great importance: it may be fairly said that no 
such thing could have happened a hundred or two hundred 
years before Luther's time. But the emancipation of the human 
reason was not by any means completed by Luther nor in 
Luther's life-time. Within our limits falls the death of Giordano 
Bruno, a young, pure-minded, disinterested philosopher, who 
was burnt at Rome for believing that there were other worlds 
besides this little speck which we call the Earth: and partly 
outside our boundary stands Bacon the assailant of the school- 
men, and Galileo the martyr of science, imprisoned for believing 
that the earth went round the sun. We have in truth to deal 
with an age in which authority generally lorded it over enquiry, 
and one particular authority, the Papacy, was I'udely assailed, and 
permanently weakened, but not upset. Not only did the Catho- 



lie Church recover itself, like one of the beech-trees so well 
known in this neighbourhood throwing out strong limbs and 
rich foliage after being pollarded ; not only did the adherents 
of the Pope in the Council of Trent take up with a new and a 
far more keen pei'ception the established dogmas of the school- 
men, hugging them more closely for the searching wind of 
heresy that blew upon them, and vying with Lutherans and 
with Calvinists in reforming the manners of the clergy; besides 
this, the very antagonists of the Papacy, at least those who 
wei'e most successful, such as Calvin at Geneva, Knox and 
Melville in Scotland, Beza in France, were very far from being 
indulgent to those who rejected the old creeds and the doctrines 
founded by the primitive Church upon the Scriptures; very far 
from tolerating either political levellers who rebelled with texts 
in their mouths against the privileged classes, or the Anabaptists 
who made for themselves out of the Bible a theory destructive 
of sound order and propriety, or even cool-headed speculative 
writers like the Socinians who argued in a scholarly way against 
the suiDcrnatural and mystic tenets of the old Christians. You 
all know that Queen Mai-y of England, some of you know that 
Francis I of France, burnt people for being Protestants. You 
have all heard of the Inquisition and you find it easy to fix 
the Inquisition in this our period; but it is not so familiar to 
you, the sad truth that Queen Elizabeth in her deliberate per- 
severing maintenance of her complete sovereignty and in her 
unswerving resistance to all that tended to subject England to 
foreign influences, put to death some hundreds of Roman 
Catholics. Could this be an age of mental liberty ? Do not 
the popular records of England and France for this century 
make you shudder at the incessant recurrence of cruelty, the 
reiterated use of the axe, the constant rekindling of the faggot? 
Does it not shock you to remember that, whilst Spain was 
ruining itself by letting clerical fiends burn out its manhood, 
our coimtry gentlemen, the noble enemies of Spain, your own 
direct ancestors, men living quiet lives as sportsmen in those 
comfortable houses which we now go to see as old houses but 
which were then fresh and smart and indicative of new wealth 
and new seeuritv, our sheriff's who had to sunimon the counties 



if the beacons announced the appearance of King Philip's big 
ships, might at any time be called upon by a Queen whom it 
was their delight and glory to obey, called upon to take some 
unlucky Jesuit, or some infatuated neighbour bearing some good 
county name like Babington or Titchborne, and see him slowly 
tortured to death, perhaps with a young wife holding the head 
of the sufferer whilst the executioner was taking out his 
bowels. 

How came our gentlemen to serve their Queen in these 
devilries ? I think this is the most interesting question that 
you can ask yourselves when you are reading of these times. 

And I beg you not to take such an answer as you will find 
in the earlier volumes- of a popular but unsound book, called 
Fronde's History of England. Do not listen to an author who 
justifies the cruelties of our great sovereigns. Take the old 
fashioned judgment, and say with all sound lawyers and all 
enlightened professors that these deeds of persecution were 
evil, and the English country gentlemen of those days were 
wrong in obeying their monarchs thus far. But observe that, 
bad as the executions were, they were not vindictive, but pre- 
cautionary. When Elizabeth came to the throne the Protest- 
ants did not avenge the sufferings of their friends. There was 
more retaliation against Papists in Scotland than in any other 
country; and the difference between Scots and Englishmen in 
bitterness of political resentment is a phenomenon well worth 
studying. 

Nor would I say that the Protestants felt then that indig- 
nation against Popish blood-thirstiness which was expressed in a 
later day by Milton and Cromwell, when the saints were slaugh- 
tered by the Duke of Savoy. On the other hand our people 
were not cowed by Gai-diner and Bonner as they had been by 
Arundel in the days of the Lollards, when free religion was 
stamped out and England stupefied for three generations by 
bitter tyrannj': As far as I can see, the subjects of Henry, Mary, 
and Elizabeth, looked on at the burnings and beheadings not so 
much with pity, or terror, or resentment, or despondency, as Avith 
awful reverence for the monarch's superhuman power. 1 do not 
suppose they actually knew how different this royalty was from 



8 

the royalty of Edward IV or Henry IV. They could not have 
drawn the contrast as we can ; but they must have felt a strange 
enlargement of mind at seeing earthly majesty taking this terrible 
yet beautiful shape. The histories I used to read taught me a 
dull lesson; that the Wars of the Roses destroyed the feudal 
nobility, and that a crafty king took advantage of this levelling to 
make himself strong ; and I used to despise Sir Thomas More 
and others for being so reverential to the tyrant who slew them 
wantonly ; I used to feel that if I had lived then and had had a 
quarrel with Henry VIII I would have treated him as the Roman 
nobles treated Tiberius, with sulky contumacy and round cursing. 
I still abhor the king for killing Sir Thomas More, and I regret 
that More did not stand at bay; but I fancy I see how it was 
that the sufferers did homage up to the last hour. Henry was 
something more than an extremely able indefatigable and kingly 
person. He was what they call homme drapeau : the impersona- 
tion of a cause. The cause was " England against all comers." 
He was captain of a side in a game of excitement up to that time 
unparalleled. In appealing against the Pope to the Universities 
of Europe he was doing more than any one had ever done to 
mark out the individuality of our nation and at the same time to 
create a public opinion for his own people in tune with the 
opinion of all the educated classes of Europe. Our little realm 
became for his sake and through his agency as conspicuous and 
as important as the German Empire, or France, or Venice. He 
was contending for the right to take such measures as would 
ensure the peaceful transference of his strong monarchy to a 
legitimate heir, the only security against another brutalizing war 
of succession ; and I beg you to observe that he and his children 
did in a wonderful way save our people from the distractions 
which tore to pieces Germany, France, Scotland, and the Low 
Countries. There were troubles and insurrections but no rebel- 
lion. Violent change came from above ; not from the ruled, but 
from the rulers. Henry VIII is literally our one and only 
revolutionist ; his destruction of monasteries was a sort of social 
revolution : but in this and in other harsh and trenchant acts, and 
in the general course of his singularly vigilant and laborious 
administration, he was constantly moulding our modern England, 



9 

fashioning that State which combines a strong executive with 
the activity of single citizens and the persistency of corporations. 
Consider how many estabHshments date from his reign : consider 
the extension of our judicial system to Wales, the formation of 
new dioceses, the founding of two great Colleges each in its way 
unique, the incorporation of the College of Physicians, the 
employment of professional envoys, the construction of forts and 
garrisons with the nucleus of a standing army, (the yeomen of the 
guard), the appointment of Lord Lieutenants, the creation of the 
Trinity house for ensuring a supply of trained pilots, the com- 
mencement of a royal or standing navy. This was above all 
reigns up to that time, perhaps since that time, a reign signalized 
by constructive originality. And how remarkable it must seem 
to you that Henry should have such weight on the continent, 
with so small an expenditure of money and blood, indeed with so 
little money to spend, and so small a following in war. This 
honourable position in what is called the state system of Europe 
was maintained, as you will not fail to notice, not altogether by 
Edward and Mary, but almost satisfactorily by Elizabeth. You 
cannot perhaps name off hand any English general who won a 
battle or took a town on the Continent throughout our whole 
era; and yet you are in a vague way conscious that the power 
of England was throughout the Tudor period more generally 
recognized in Europe than it had been in the days of Edward III 
or Henry V. I say in Europe generally ; for the Tudors were 
felt and known far beyond the regions to which the Black Prince 
or the victor of Agincourt ever penetrated. 

The causeless wars of the middle ages are very different 
from a sustained policy, in which wars are but incidental. 
Petty enterprises may keep a nation on the alert, but they do 
not give a moral interest. To have a perpetual elevation of 
sentiment in a people you must have a struggle and the 
memory of a struggle in which there is some high issue. When 
two sets of combatants persevere for more than one gene- 
ration, the one set to maintain the Unity of the Church regard, 
less of nationality, the other set to maintain at the risk of 
losing Church Unity the uniformity and compactness of a na- 
tion, there is something worth fighting for, and there is some- 

1—3 



10 

thing at stake for the winning of which men will bear much 
from their friends and will teach their children to bear no less if 
needs be. The royal supremacy, that is the exercise of full and 
entire sovereignty within the king's dominions, was by Henry and 
his children asserted with a singular blending of wrath and cool- 
headed pertinacity. Think of this, and you will not fail to see 
the continuity of Tudor policy ; and you will hardly wonder at 
the patient submission of our people to Mary's dreadful cruelties, 
if you reflect on this, that they had been educated and inured to 
the belief that the sovereign had a right to regulate the whole 
life of the nation. It ma^' indeed be doubted whether our people 
would have borne with Mary had she tried to make England like 
Spain, either by establishing the Inquisition or by imposing such 
taxes as Philip levied in Spain, In being reconciled with the 
Pope Mary did not wholly betray her country to the foreigner. 
I cannot see that she played a second part under Spain in such 
a way as to fall off" from the dignified position won for this realm 
by her father. And, be this as it may, it is manifest that she 
used legal means, and followed the course of her predecessors, in 
regularly issuing writs from her courts of law against those who 
were supposed to be wrong about Transubstantiation : content 
with our parliamentary and judicial machinery she did not like 
Catherine de Medicis resort to treachery, such as the Bartholomew, 
or to wholesale massacre like the execution at the Chateau of 
Amboise ; nor did she set one body of her subjects to worry and 
prey upon another, nor employ foreigners to put down insur- 
rection, nor degrade her monarchy by making her confessor 
greater than the great officers of the household. 

Shame on him who does not feel ashamed of Tower Hill and 
Smithfield : but when you have become acquainted with the 
licentious Francis of Angouleme, who burnt the Protestants 
without being himself in earnest about anything, j^ou will have 
less loathing for our cruel Henry, Avho with all his crimes was 
more than any man, more than Edward I or Cromwell or Wil- 
liam the Third, the maker of our England, the champion of our 
nationality. And if you listen to what one of your teachers 
will tell you of Philip II and another of Catherine de Medicis, 
you will recognize in Henry's daughters, scarred as they are with 



11 

detestable sins, a certain fidelity to England and a certain ad- 
herence to law and a certain candour in facing public opinion ; 
so that you will be inclined to say, " had I lived then I should 
have been proud of my strong government and ready to pay a 
good price for the honour." 

I dare say you think that it would have been more romantic 
to wear a red or a white rose, to go with a troop of vassals to 
push and be pushed up and down a field at Barnet or Tewkes- 
bury, to live forsooth the gay and generous life of a feudal 
baron. There is a novel called " The last of the Barons," which 
you are not unlikely to have fallen in with : it is meant to give 
you a notion tliat a grand and somewhat poetical thing called 
the feudal system passed away about the time of the battle of 
Barnet, and was replaced by the vulgar homely thing called the 
march of intellect. Now concerning the feudal system it is 
important that you should know what its essence was. It had 
nothing to do with chivalry or religion or sentiment. It had 
everything to do with the tenure of land and the administra- 
tion of justice. The idea of feudalism is, when reduced to a 
simple expression, the close connection between land-holding 
and jurisdiction. Every king of strong will and self-respect 
did something to overrule this territorial domination. Maxi- 
miUan of Germany tried to do this and failed. The Tudors 
succeeded. Hence you find in Germany a religious contest 
becoming also a political war, a series of wars, issuing in 
the recognition of many sovereignties and three religions; in 
England you have the same religious contest fought out in 
commissions and courts of law with grievous harm done to 
individuals, but with no wounds inflicted on a town or a district, 
with no wide-spreading alarm, with no interruption to the 
building of good houses, the opening of new markets, the study 
of new languages, the growth of schools and colleges, the 
domestic enjoyment of poetical music, the knitting together of 
intellectual friendships, the elaboration of courtesy and hos- 
pitality, and the germination of that which bore fruit in the days 
of the Cavaliers, the English gentleman's sense of honour. 

The 16th century comes between two periods of civil war, 
the wars of the Roses, and the war of the King and the Parlia- 



12 

merit. Compare the two generations, observe how aimless, how 
capricious, how utterly devoid of anything like a political prin- 
ciple was the struggle between York and Lancaster ; how fero- 
cious and fickle wei'e the combatants ; how stupid their contem- 
poraries who would not even write any satisfactory annals or 
chronicles ; how soulless were the first books printed by Caxton 
for that generation; how backward we were compared with 
Italy. Then turn to the reign of Charles I and Cromwell; see 
how Milton and Lockhart and Moriand charmed and swayed the 
foreigners ; how generous and honest to their friends and foes 
were the Capels and Astleys, the Hutchinsons and Fairfaxes, 
what a beautiful mind was the mind of Cowley, and the mind of 
Evelyn. Then ask the books, and they will tell you, what influ- 
ences were at work between the two periods of civil war by 
which you may account for the happy change. You will be 
perhaps contented with the old-fashioned phrase "the Revival of 
Literature." What then was the Literature which revived? 
Was it history, the narration of events ? That had never ceased. 
There were always even in the Dark Ages some records kept, 
some chronicles. Was it verse-making ? Let us admit that 
writing classical verses had gone out of fashion in the dark ages, 
and that here was a case for revival. But this classical verse- 
making never had been since the death of Virgil more than an 
amusement, an amusement for a few idle people. The poets 
had no body of readers. In certain standard books, which are 
sure to fall in your way, you will find undue space given, and an 
excessive value assigned, to this art. Whatever may be the 
merits of classical verses they never expressed since the iEneid 
was written, the consciousness of a nation : but real poetry does 
— real poetry, like the best of the Psalms. Virgil was imitated : 
but the Psalms were restored to life. From the matchless lines 
of Virgil every now and then some combative student or some 
scholarly man of action took a few words that served him as a 
charging cry or a rallying cheer ; but when king David came to 
life again in French and English he put his soul into myriads of 
souls. As the Pentecostal Church rejoicing for the deliverance 
of Peter and John broke forth into a Psalm and could not pause 
till the old words were followed up in new words of comment and 



k 



13 

recognition, so did the Western Europeans utter themselves in 
hymns, with simple tunes, and with noble throbbings of hearts in 
unison. Do not pay any attention to those who keep asunder 
the revival of literature and the spread of Protestant doctrine. 
Incomparably the most energetic literature that revived was 
the literature of the Hebrews. Philippe de la None, the Hu- 
guenot, whose name of romance is " Bras de fer," read the 
Jewish books in prison, in a dungeon where the foul damp dripped 
on a wounded body, and his reading was not a meritorious Avork, 
but a joyous pastime. What else did the men of action read ? 
I think that next to the Bible the book that came to life and 
helped our forefathers to live virtuously was Plutarch. In 
Plutarch''s lives of great men, of which it has been said by scho- 
lars that it is the one book of all others that they would have 
saved out of a fire to preserve the memory of the old Pagans, our 
unique man Shakespeare, and many lesser men such as Montaigne, 
the first really popular French writer, found the highest stand- 
ards then attainable of civic virtue and popular activity. In 
France by Amyot, a servant at court who learnt Greek on pur- 
pose, and in England by North, Plutarch was translated and 
made the friend and guide of ordinary gentlemen. Now you 
are not to suppose that the names of Plutarch's heroes were 
altogether new to the readers of Amyot and of North. In the mid- 
dle ages Theseus, who is one of Plutarch's heroes, was com- 
memorated and his name made familiar to people ; and when the 
author of Midsummer Night's Dream passes before you his 
prettily contrasted groups of cunning fairies, silly philandering 
gentlefolk, and unimaginative handicraftsmen, so as to bring out 
in high relief the liberal, generous, dignified Theseus, he is 
reproducing a knightly personage already made known, four 
hundred years before, by Chaucer ; but with a difference. For 
Chaucer's Theseus is but a secondhand reproduction of the origi- 
nal whom we find in Euripides : Shakespeare's Theseus is an 
idealized English gentleman, impersonating a morality and a cour- 
tesy not known to the middle age storytellers. When Shakespeare 
takes an ancient personage, say Brutus, the real hero of the play 
called Julius Caesar, he is expressing the morality of his own 
England in terms of Rome. Not Shakespeare only, but all the 



14 

good writers of the age, dealt with classical antiquity and with 
Scriptural antiquity in a different way from the middle age 
writers. These early moderns were vividly conscious of being 
moderns. Instead of letting Alexander and Csesar float in a 
haze of strangeness with the Seven Champions and the Paladins 
undistinguishably, and treating all history and all hagiology with 
equal disregard of costume, they felt that they were separated 
by mountains of experience from the ancients, and that humanity 
had been so altered by the holy mj'steries that men could never 
be again as they had been ; yet with this feeling they entered 
into a fine rivalry with the best pagans; they would have a 
second faithful pilot, and another' Argo to carry the chosen 
princes. There was a Golden Fleece to win : I do not mean 
America, nor the Spice islands of the East, though the opening 
of those regions was enough to fill young men with hope : I do 
not mean intellectual liberty, though in the little republics that 
were battling against Philip II there was a refuge for all free 
thinkers ; I mean the happiness of belonging to a great nation. 
We see this won in our days by Italians, and then by Prussians. 
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the long-baftied 
Frenchmen won it at the sacrifice of their leader's consistency. 
Henry IV of France, like Cavour and Bismark in our day, sinned 
for his people that they might attain unity and greatness. 
Englishmen had, a hundred years or so before the death of 
Henry of Navarre, gained much on France, yet before the Union 
with Scotland, and at a time when our only colony was close to 
our doors in Ireland, English patriots could hardly be satisfied. 
But on the death of Elizabeth we were on the eve of great enter- 
prises in the East and in America, which were to make up for 
our loss of place in Europe, There occur to me three plays of 
Shakespeare's in which the pride of an Englishman and his trust 
in his country's fortunes are expressed : — King John, Henry V, 
and Henry VIII. Try whether you can find in Shakespeare any 
passage implying an anticipation of conquest in the New World 
or in the East ; or any passage indicating the importance of 
union with Scotland and Ireland. I do not promise that you 
will find any ; but if you look through Macbeth, Othello, and 
Tempest, you will not miss your reward. 



15 

I hope I have made it clear to you that, in speaking of litera- 
ture, I mean the written utterance of perceptions and sentiments 
with which active as well as studious, busy as well as leisurely, 
persons sympathize. It does not follow that people are writing 
of themselves. When iEschylus wrote the Persae and gave a 
spirited account of the battle of Salamis he was avowedly and 
directly reporting a recent transaction. But he was not more 
faithfully representing the perceptions and sentiments of Athe- 
nians, than was Sophocles w^hen he described the Salaminians of 
a remote generation longing for the presence, groaning for the 
strange behaviour, and lamenting for the death of their leader. 
Sophocles carries his country with him to the plains of Troy. 
Virgil takes the Roman people with him into the beleaguered 
garrison of Ascanius. An active nation conscious of national 
life listens to a writer who speaks of human action, though the 
scene be set far off in time or in space. An Athenian was capa- 
ble of feeling as a Greek ; to use a learned phrase, an Athenian 
might have a Pan-Hellenic sympathy. So in Elizabethan 
England a man whose emotions had been roused at the coming 
of the Armada might with good reason write, or read what 
another wrote, not about the Armada but about a struggle so 
far distant as to admit of being veiled in mythical disguise. 
One might have expected our poets in those days to write 
about King Arthur or Richard Cceur de Lion. But it would be 
a mistake similar to the mistakes of which we spoke at the 
beginning of this lecture, the mistake of tjing you down to one 
consideration, if we were to assume that the subjects of EHza- 
beth felt only as Englishmen. Spenser's preface to the Faerie 
Queen is patriotic or national ; but the book itself seems to me 
to be written more for a Christian gentleman than for an English 
gentleman in particular. For the honour of England no doubt: 
since he set himself to rival Tasso. But what of Tasso himself? 
Did he not set himself to rival Virgil and to glorify' Christendom 
generally as Virgil had glorified the Roman People ? Why then 
do we not set Tasso down as a mere imitator ? Were not the 
Crusades over, and the motives of the Crusaders as remote from 
Tasso as the motives of the middle age monks ? No : for, over 
and above the struggle about Papal authority, the best parts of 



16 

Europe were excited from time to time throughout our century 
by the wish to combat tlie Turk ; and there was in fact much 
less soHd courage and devotion shown by the Crusaders than by 
the Germans who raUied round Charles V to save Vienna, by 
the Knights of St John battling for the island of Rhodes and after- 
wards for Malta, by the Venetians and Spaniards in the famous 
fight of Lepanto. The Christian Epic "Jerusalem Delivered" 
was, I believe, an expression of the sentiment which bound to- 
gether the nations of W^estern Europe in resistance to the 
encroaching Turks ; and I would ask you to observe that not 
only did Tasso by this work provoke the emulation of Spenser, 
but also found an English translator in a Yorkshire squire, Fair- 
fax, whose Godfrey of BuUoyne is by competent judges preferred 
to the Italian original. And before you have forgotten the 
name Lepanto I wish to call your attention to the fact that one 
of the Spaniards who there fought against the Turks was the 
high-minded and enthusiastic author of a celebrated satire, per- 
haps the only beautiful satire, Don Quixote. 

The Turks were not the only organized nation then standing 
out before Christendom in such relief, as to make an European 
vividly conscious of his belonging to Christendom. It is within 
our period that we find antipathy against heathendom impelling 
men as a strong motive to aggression. It is in the reign of 
Charles V, the grandson and practically the heir of those who 
drove out the Moors from Spain, that the curiously constructed 
realms of Mexico and Peru were overthrown by Spaniards ; and 
at the latter end of our century we contemplate in the East the 
long reign of Akbar, the greatest of the great Moguls. The 
Mogul empire founded by Baber at the time of Luther's rebellion 
against the Pope is the only Oriental institution, as far as I am 
aware, worthy of being studied by a politician ; but I mention it 
now merely to show, that, as the Greeks in their heyday of 
activity were made conscious of the Hellenic character by com- 
paring themselves with the barbarians organized in Egypt and in 
Mesopotamia, so the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, and 
then by the English, encountered in Hindostan a very imposing, 
and in Akbar's reign a really admirable, system of govern- 
ment, worthy at first sight of being compared with the Roman 



17 

Empire, and superior to the Turkish or even the Spanish system. 
The contemplation of the court of Delhi with its great works of 
munificence, its code of laws, and the economical progress 
manifest in Upper India, could not fail to bring with it some 
enlargement of mind. But after all the Mogul state was but a 
foil to set off' a France, or an England. A nation which is illite- 
rate, or a nation whose literature is but a toy, is not commensu- 
rable with a nation whose memories and hopes, whose sym- 
pathies and antipathies, whose politics and controversies, are 
uttered earnestly and recorded durably. 

Was it then thus with all our European states which 
shared in the double struggle, the strviggle for and against the 
Po^DC, and the struggle for Christendom? Did it in every 
ease turn out to be true that the people, which gave up its 
freedom and broke down many privileges and bore with much 
tyranny, to be compact and efficient in such a struggle had 
a new growth of literature? You will, if you read essays and 
hear lectures, often meet with some such sweeping statement as 
this : " There cannot be a living people without a living lite- 
rature." I beg that you will do me the justice of remarking that I 
have made no such generalization. I am content with saying 
that the 16th century was an age in which European nations 
tried with more or less good luck to weld themselves by much 
mutual infliction of pain and by much self-sacrifice into a 
cohesion closer than had been known in history since the decay 
of the Roman Empire; and that at the same time their minds 
laid hold of some written thoughts of Hebrews, Greeks and 
Romans, which had a new significance for them because of 
their own present experience, and that from this confluence of 
memory faith and hope streamed the new river of the modern 
intellect. 

And to this recapitulation 1 would add that the union of 
Christendom in sympathy, as well as the fair working out of 
controversies between Christians, was rendered possible by that 
which cramped the expansion of separate popular literatures, 
the universal employment amongst educated men of the Latin 
language; which, by the way, has left its obvious mark on our 
political maps in the many Latinized names of districts like 



18 

Transylvania, Livonia, Bavaria, Westphalia, relics of the old 
diplomatic geography. 

But I took care not to affirm of all the nations which com- 
posed the European State System that which has been said of 
England, and might have been said of France and Spain, per- 
haps also of Scotland, that the struggles generated an influential 
literature in our century. Without going the round of the na- 
tions then existing I would name Sweden. No modern nation 
was more the child of the Reformation than Sweden. Gustavus 
Vasa was its Henry: he dealt very summarily and harshly with 
ecclesiastical privileges, and he granted heartily the demand his 
subjects made for free preaching of Lutheran doctrines. Elected 
to the monarchy as much as any king ever was in any country, 
he made it a real domination, so that his people might be a 
compact people; yet he did not, like some makers of compact 
natures, crush the political activity of all but the king's agents. 
In many ways is the history of Sweden, which is happily written 
for us by a Swedish professor with a statesman's mind, similar 
and parallel to our own. Yet no one ever heard of Swedish 
16th century books. Sweden had not, I believe, anything to 
correspond to the Scottish ballads, or the humble German 
poetry of Hans Sachs, much less had she a Cervantes, a Mon- 
taigne, or a Spenser. Besides what may be called the luck that 
there is about the birth of inen of genius, there is another 
kind of luck on which depends the growth of a literature in 
stirring times. The existing form of the vernacular language 
may be favourable or unfavourable. Language is only to some 
limited extent within the control of human will. If you inherit 
an ugly cumbrous language you cannot, merely because you 
wish it, compete with classical authors. The Poles are said 
to be as nimble-witted and eager-hearted as the Greeks, as 
enthusiastic and stubborn as the Scots: but I never heard that 
there was any Tyrtaeus or any Burns in Poland. 

And I must admit that the connection between national 
activity and influential literature, which I have endeavoured to 
set before you as being characteristic of the 16th century, breaks 
down in Germany; for, though Luther is said to have made the 
German language in translating the Bible, and though his hymns 



19 

were so influential as to be substantially parts of his action, yet 
some one, I know not who, put the fine frenzy of Germany into 
a strait waistcoat by formintj a German sentence in what he 
took to be the model of a Latin sentence; and so it became 
impossible in that painstaking nation to write eloquently. 

I hazard the suggestion here that the Lutheran Reformation 
would have been much more generally successful in Europe 
had it been represented by a less repulsive and more flexible 
language. What a pity that Queen Elizabeth, so good a 
linguist, could not communicate, as Queen Victoria can, with 
Germans. How inconvenient that the ideas should be found 
in one country, and the intelligible terms and pleasant inflexions 
in another. I invite the lecturer who is to discourse to you on 
Italy to explain the failure of Protestantism in Italy, and to con- 
sider whether it be not a good part of the truth to say that the 
Lutheran Gospel came before the disciples of Michael Angelo 
with a sound, and in a literary shape, abhorrent to a man of 
taste. Albert Durer the great German artist, who died in 1528, 
went to Venice to learn something from the sweet John Bellini 
and the other lovers of beauty who painted there. Why did 
not a Venetian in his turn go to Nuremberg? Were not the 
Italians Tcpelled by German ugliness? I think the same re- 
pulsion was felt in a more serious business than painting. Our 
own people in the Tudor age drew freely on French and 
Italian literature : why not on German ? We are supposed to 
have imported the Ileformation from Wittenberg; yet if was 
not till the days of the Long Parliament that Luther's celebrated 
Table Talk was translated into English. Though Queen Eliza- 
beth was more of a Lutheran than anything else, our Prayer-book 
and Church Articles are modified rather by Calvinism than by 
Lutheranism. We are said to be of the same stock as the Ger- 
mans, and we never had a quarrel with the Germans that really 
brought us into mortal strife : yet we stood strangely aloof from 
them in the IGth century; and their wars, even the wars between 
Charles V and the Princes of the League of Smalcald, have not 
much interest for an English reader. 

Yet there is a German speaking town which has a special 
claim on our regard. The town of Zurich was the spiritual 



20 

and political child of a remarkable man, Zuinglius, a man how- 
ever who comes at a great distance below Luther and Calvin 
in historical importance; and it was the Zuinglian church of 
Zurich which comforted our exiled Protestants in Mary's reign, 
and sent them back to us enlivened and blessed with friend- 
ships, to be the forerunners of the Puritans and the ultimate 
founders of Nonconformity. Our divines however correspond- 
ed with their Zurich friends in Latin, This is a remarkable 
instance of friendly communication between individuals of dif- 
ferent countries acting for small sets of friends, but not for 
regular societies : and it should be distinguished from our in- 
tercourse with the Dutch and with the French Protestants, 
which was encouraged, and in some cases directed, by govern- 
ment. 

Does it not seem to you eccentric thus to speak of friend- 
ship as a part of history ? You are all brought up in the 
worship of Mars. History is a string of battles, is it not? 
Or shall we say that it is a patchwork of crimes? Here we 
have been meditating on the sixteenth century, and we have not 
shot William the Silent, nor blown up Darnley. I am inclined 
to think that the battles and the crimes can take care of 
themselves. But the revival of friendship is likely to be over- 
looked. Friendship flourished among the Romans and the Jews, 
died out in the dark ages, grew up again with the other new 
shoots from the old Roman and Jewish stocks. Friendship 
has been described as unity of sentiment about the public good 
or commonwealth. Men esteem and admire each other when 
engaged in the maintenance of some cause concerning the good 
of others. Men coupled like David and Jonathan, like Epaminon- 
das and Pelopidas, like Cicero and Atticus, are men speaking the 
same tongue. Never I believe till the days of Henry VHI were 
men thus attached to each other who spoke in two vernacular 
languages. The literary war against dulness and superstition 
brought men together in spite of the estranging sea : Erasmus 
the Hollander and Sir Thomas More the English lawyer were 
friends ; and at the later end of our century Sir Philip Sidney 
was the friend of Hubert Languet. The age of schism was also 
the age of the republic of letters. The men who gloried in their 



21 

loyalty and in the independence of their country were also able 
to break the bars of nationality and form intimacies with 
foreigners. This development of friendship is, I think, well 
worth study ; and, generally speaking, I would have you look in 
biographical history, as well as in poetry, for the budding and 
flowering of moral sympathy or sensibility. 

These suggestions have fallen from me almost involuntarily ; 
they are not solid or precise teaching, but they are distilled 
from the floating vapour of old reading, and they are genuine. 
Perhaps they may help some three or four of my hearers to form 
some conception of modern, as opposed to mediaeval, humanity. 

In your own studies, which our lectures are meant not to 
supersede but to direct and support, you will do well to form for 
yourselves from the common manuals and text-books a set of 
chronological stepping stones, or as they have been called by a 
pretty writer Landmarks of History. 

Some acquaintance you must have with the genealogy of 
sovereigns ; and in particular you should be absolutely clear 
about the descent of Lady Jane Grey and of Mary Queen of 
Scots from Elizabeth of York. 

Certain battles, though they decided nothing permanently, 
such battles as Flodden, Marignano, Pavia, St Quentin, Dreux, 
Jarnac, Moncontour, Ivry, perhaps Pinkie and Langside, the taking 
of Boulogne by the English, of Rome by the Germans and of Calais 
by the French, the sieges of Metz, Leyden, Antwerp and Paris, 
the maritime expeditions of the Spaniards against Tunis, and of 
our countrymen against Cadiz, Sir Henry Sidney's campaign in 
Ireland, his son's campaign in Holland, the marches of the Duke 
of Alva into Flanders, of the Prince of Parma into France, and of 
Cortez to Mexico, cannot be left unnoticed by any student 
however sick of carnage ; but in military history you will gene- 
rally find that the taking of a town is of more importance than 
an advantage obtained in the field, and you will be on your 
guard against exaggerating with English feelings such an event 
as the battle of Spurs. 

The relative importance of military affairs is ascertained 
easily enough by comparing a list extracted from a table of 



22 

contents with the references made to the affairs in Maeaulay's 
Essays, of which there are, I think, at least three bearing on 
our subject. Of the writers whom Macaulay reviews there are 
two, Hallam and Ranke, whom I beHeve to be the wisest and 
most trustworthy writers that you can consult : you will do well, 
if not now, yet in after years, to read Hallam's Constitutional 
History of these reigns, Hallam's Introduction to the Literature 
of Europe, Ranke's Popes, Ranke's Germany at the time of the 
Reformation, Ranke's shorter treatises on the decline of the 
Turkish and Spanish kingdoms. Perhaps you will, many of you, 
prefer at present writers who give you but little philosophy, but 
who are well-intentioned and well-informed, Prescott who has 
written of Philip II, and Motley whose books on the Dutch 
Republic and the United Netherlands, though not likely to have 
a durable authority, are deservedly popular. I should recommend 
to you Campbell's lives of Sir Thomas More and other Chan- 
cellors of the century, and Miss Strickland's Queens of England, 
rather than Buckle's farrago of superstitious science, a book 
which was with remarkable unanimity condemned by theologians, 
lawyers, patriots, and genuine philosophers. I had rather have 
you read Kenilworth than Westward Ho, and James' novels such 
as the Huguenot, rather than Dumas ; Kenilworth is perhaps the 
best of all historical novels ; but you should not take Scott's 
account of Leicester without correcting it by the light of Motley. 
Froude's later volumes are very much better than his account of 
Henry VIII ; and if he had had a legal or scientific training he 
would have been an historian of the first order. But I prefer, 
and I hope some of you will prefer, to his eager womanly narra- 
tives such a solid judicial account of things as they stand in 
evidence as we have lately received in Burton's history of Scotland. 
We run some risk now-a-days of being oppressed and bullied by 
a writer who has hit upon some one mass of old papers : and 
from this we may be protected by passing from the men who are 
mastered by their own discoveries to the men of more ripe and 
comprehensive intellect, who can digest new evidence with old, 
and graduate their assertions according to the results obtained 
by critical comparison. 

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



rlSiM^ ?.^ CONGRESS 

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018 499 827 



